The Asian American assimilation paradox

ABSTRACT

The fastest growing ethnoracial group in the United States, Asian Americans are the most highly educated, the highest earning, and the most likely to intermarry. Once deemed diseased, morally deviant, unfit for citizenship, and unassimilable, Asian Americans have attained unprecedented racial mobility, now boasting socioeconomic outcomes that surpass those of native-born Whites. Their attainment has led some social scientists to conclude that Asians are rapidly assimilating into American mainstream and remaking it in the process. While Asian American attainment defies theories of racial disadvantage, their experiences with xenophobia, racism, and anti-Asian violence vex theories of assimilation – pointing to an assimilation paradox. At no recent time has the paradox become more apparent than during COVID-19 pandemic. We maintain that the paradox reflects three tensions: the ahistorical nature of sociologists’ research on Asian American assimilation; the tautology of using educational attainment acquired from immigrants’ countries of origin as a measure of structural assimilation in their country of destination; and the disjuncture between the way sociologists normatively measure assimilation and the way ethnoracial minorities experience it. By integrating legacies of exclusion into theories of Asian American assimilation, addressing the tautology, and incorporating a subject-centered approach into empirical measures, we advance theory and research, and reclaim narratives of Asian American assimilation.

KEYWORDS:

• Asian Americans
• assimilation
• COVID-19
• immigration
• race

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge feedback from Mitchell Duneier, Didier Fassin, Patricia Fernández-Kelly, Alejandro Portes, Paul Starr, Yu Xie, the editors and reviewers of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, the 2022-23 Members of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, and the participants of the Center for Migration and Development at Princeton University. For fellowship support, Jennifer Lee thanks the Institute for Advanced Study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The 2022 American Experiences with Discrimination Survey was conducted online by Momentive (formerly SurveyMonkey) March 2-9, 2022 among a total sample of 16,901 adults ages 18 and over, including 1,991 Asian or Asian Americans and 186 Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islanders living in the United States. It was a one-year follow up to 2021 American Experiences with Discrimination Survey conducted online March 18-25, 2021 among a total sample of 16,336 adults ages 18 and over, including 2,017 Asian or Asian Americans, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islanders living in the United States. The 2021 survey launched just two days after the Atlanta massacre.

Respondents for these surveys were selected from more than two million people who take surveys on the SurveyMonkey platform each day. SurveyMonkey used a third-party panel provider to obtain additional sample with quotas for Asian or Asian American and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander respondents. The modeled error estimate for the full sample is plus or minus 1.5 percentage points and for the following subgroups: Asian American or Pacific Islander +/-3.5 percentage points. Data have been weighted for age, race, sex, education, citizenship status, and geography using the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to reflect the demographic composition of the United States age 18 and over.

2 The 2022 STAATUS Index – the Social Tracking of Asian Americans in the United States – is a national survey of 5,113 U.S. residents, age 18 and over, including 2,840 White Americans, 888 Black Americans, 1,023 Hispanic Americans, and 1,074 Asian Americans. The survey was conducted online in English between February 10 to February 28, 2022 by Savanta Research. Results are valid within +/-1.4% at the 95% confidence level. This margin of error increases with subgroup analyses. The sample was weighted using population parameters (race, age, gender, education, and region) from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey for adults 18 years of age or older. This weighting reflects the national population. The 2022 STAATUS Index was a follow-up to the 2021 STAATUS Index.

3 The California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) is the largest annual state-based population health survey in the United States and has facilitated the generation of population-based AANHPI subgroup estimates used in studies nationwide. The CHIS conducts interviews in Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, Vietnamese, and Tagalog in addition to English and Spanish. The survey is limited to California, but California is home to the largest single-race NHPI and Asian population of any US state. In its annual continuous survey, CHIS randomly selects 1 adult to interview in a randomly sampled participating household. An address-based sample methodology is used to complete the random sampling, with multimode data collection done via Web or telephone. One of the primary goals of the sampling strategy is to produce statistics that reflect the state’s racial/ethnic diversity. The module was administered to CHIS adult respondents who reported “any mention” of “Asian” or “NHPI” for race, and thus both single-race and multiracial AANHPIs were included. The AANHPI COVID-19 module was developed in response to the rise of hate, racism, xenophobia, and discrimination targeting AANHPI communities.

4 While the data are weighted to represent the U.S. Asian population, the margin for error for Asian national origin groups prevents us from data disaggregating within the Asian American population.

5 Respondents were asked, “Have you ever been a victim of a hate crime? That is, have you ever had someone verbally or physically abuse you, or damage your property specifically because of your race or ethnicity?”

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USA.